Sen. Alice Johnson finds the Senate busy but more sedate than the House

Published March 11, 2013 at 3:27 pm

by T.W. Budig
ECM Capitol reporter

Sen. Alice Johnson is busy.

The Spring Lake Park Democrat was greeting constituents the morning after a marathon 12-hour Senate floor session (March 8) and says the number of visitors to her office exceeds anything she experienced when she was in the House.

Every 15 minutes, new people filter through.

“I think people are thirsting for something good to come out of our government,” Johnson said.

Short months ago she was enjoying retirement with her husband Richard Jefferson, a fellow lawmaker Johnson met serving in the House and then married.

The couple spent the last 12 years visiting foreign countries, climbing mountains, surf casting in the Gulf of Mexico.

But unsettled local DFL politics early last year had Johnson, who left the House of Representatives12 years ago, filing for office in Senate District 37.

“When I hung up the phone,” Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk, DFL-Cook, said of Johnson inquiring about candidates, “I thought, ‘If Alice Johnson still has the spunk in her when I served with her in the House, she’s going to be a member of the Senate,’”

Bakk’s premonition was correct.

Johnson defeated Republican Sen. Pam Wolf by a comfortable margin.

But Johnson flatly says being away from the Legislature for more than a decade took a toll.

“Because I was away for a dozen years, I really wasn’t up to snuff in what going on in legislating,” Johnson said.

“So it’s been kind of an adjustment time,” she said.

But the juices still flow.

“I sensed myself getting really energized when I’m working on things like special education, the school safety bill, mental health issues, early childhood intervention — I still find myself very, very passionate about those issues,” Johnson, a former House education finance chairwoman, said.

Johnson now finds herself serving in the Senate, a body one former House member sneeringly used to depict as populated by “the wigs” and a body often noted more for the sedateness of its debate than the sizzle.

(Senators have referred to sufficiently retrained former House members in the the Senate as “House broken.”)

But if House member caricature the Senate as stuffy, a smiling Johnson suggested little doubt exists in the minds of the her new colleagues about which body which is the most exalted.